Ben Hewitt, the new Managing Director at Metis Aerospace, will be in celebratory mood at DVD in Millbrook this week as he looks back on the sales record for the company’s Skyperion systems, which now counts nations on four continents among its customers.
Skyperion Rugged is the operationally-proven RF detection, tracking and identification capability integrated into the RAF’s ORCUS system and Leonardo’s Falcon Shield deployed with NATO allies in Europe and the Americas for some time. This, combined with the recent contract announcement at Eurosatory when Kongsberg selected Skyperion Lightweight for the Polish C-UAS system and a new trials contract in Oceania, has led to the achievement.
All Skyperion products are designed to build a real-time picture of drone activity and other RF emissions, helping safeguard personnel, assets and critical infrastructure wherever they operate. Skyperion captures RF emissions of varying strengths across the spectrum, filtering out background noise and known entities, before rapidly analysing them to identify and locate potential threats. The system is operationally deployed with multiple NATO partners and is distinguished by a non-library-based open electronic support measures waveform analysis methodology – an approach that identifies both cooperative and non-cooperative emitters across a wide spectrum of frequencies, providing an agile, comprehensive RF detection capability without reliance on static signal libraries. This advanced technology analyses signal characteristics directly, enabling more adaptive detection and classification in dynamic, contested electromagnetic environments. Traditional library-dependent systems, by comparison, can be constrained by pre-defined threat databases, require frequent updates and may struggle to recognise novel, modified, low-probability-of-intercept or previously unseen emitters.
Skyperion is the ideal choice to be integrated into a wider range of counter-drone capabilities (radar, optics, jamming and defeat) because it has been designed and manufactured to be system agnostic, modular and with an open architecture. This allows sovereign nations, large primes or system integrators to easily incorporate Metis products with other best-in-class technologies, to deliver world-leading detection, tracking, identification and defeat of rogue drones.
“Following on from our recent £30 million contract announcement at Eurosatory […] we are delighted to announce that we have now sold hundreds of Skyperion across four continents. This is excellent news for a British-designed and manufactured product [whose] global customers are recognising the benefits of using an operationally proven, system-agnostic capability like Skyperion that has been specifically designed to meet the ever-evolving challenges of countering nefarious drone activity,” observed Hewitt.
Headline image Skyperion Lightweight (Metis Aerospace)
